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guyl526490
September 26, 2025
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Send Microsoft Teams message from Application to User

  • September 26, 2025
  • 4 replies
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Hi, looking for some guidance on how to send Teams messages from our App directly to a user.

We tried using the Teams Plugin but found we were limited by only being able to send messages with authentication Authorisation Code Grant (Delegated Permissions), this was forcing each user to individually authenticate from the app, which isn't what we're looking for.

We want to send chat messages directly from a System(Application) user. (I think this is a limitation of Teams rather than the plugin itself).

We have found the below link on "Activity Notifications" in Teams rather than chat messages, has anyone had any experience with this? I'm just looking for confirmation that this method will achieve the results before I go down the rabbit hole.

learn.microsoft.com/.../teams-send-activityfeednotifications

Or if not, does anyone know any other way for us to achieve the desired behaviour?

Thanks!

    Best answer by marilub781042

    Hey! The main issue is that teams doesn’t let an app just send messages as a regular user without each person signing in. The usual workaround is to create a bot or service account in Teams and have your app send messages through that bot. That way, you can send 1:1 messages or chat messages without needing each user to authenticate.

    If you don’t need full chat messages and just want to ping users with alerts, using the activity feed notifications API is a simpler and fully supported option. It won’t create a normal chat thread, but it’s perfect for sending system-to-user notifications.

    So basically, for “real” messages, go bot route; for simple notifications, activity feed works great.

    4 replies

    J
    jessek855119
    September 29, 2025

    Hey Guy,

    There is some great information here - learn.microsoft.com/.../auth-v2-service

    In order for Teams to generate chat messages based upon a system account, the term to research is "Service Principal". There's way more detail about that in the link above than I could accurately provide here.

    We're still in the early stages of our API, so there may be additional hurdles. But here is what we have so far.

    For the graph API, you might not need the plugin in all cases.

    • Create a HTTP Connected System
      • Choose OAuth Client Credentials, input client id and secret
      • Token Request Endpoint: As noted in the above link - login.microsoftonline.com/{Tenant_Id}/oauth2/v2.0/token
    • Create integration
      • Use your connected system for authentication
      • Use the graph API for the URL, then add the appropriate query parameters / body based upon what you're trying to do. Pay specific attention to the quotes in query parameters.

    Also keep in mind that, functionally, a lot of the graph messaging API relies on Teams Id's, not email / names. We're still trying to solve that in a more fluid way.

    I don't have experience with Activity Notifications, but they will likely be our fall back plan if our currently-designed Teams chat features are not approved for production by our security team. Lots of folks get involved when there is potential (even if mitigated) for a service account to act on behalf of a user.

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    guyl526490Author
    October 3, 2025

    Thanks Jesse, that's helpful. Which Graph API are you planning to use to use?
    I see for "Send chatMessage in a channel or a chat" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/chatmessage-post?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http), Application permissions are only supported for migration.

    This means you won't be able to send chat messages directly to users using this API. Have you found another way? The only other way I could see was creating a Teams App and either sending an activity notification or setting up a "Bot" and messaging through that.

    J
    jessek855119
    October 6, 2025

    Hi Guy - With the ServicePrincipal context we have been able to do a directory search for users. I might wind up creating a sync'ed record for this purpose. I successfully tested the user search graph API using the service principal context from Appian.

    For the interactivity, we just had a Service Account setup in AD that will act as a bot, as recommended by our MS365 team.

    M
    marilub781042Answer
    October 6, 2025

    Hey! The main issue is that teams doesn’t let an app just send messages as a regular user without each person signing in. The usual workaround is to create a bot or service account in Teams and have your app send messages through that bot. That way, you can send 1:1 messages or chat messages without needing each user to authenticate.

    If you don’t need full chat messages and just want to ping users with alerts, using the activity feed notifications API is a simpler and fully supported option. It won’t create a normal chat thread, but it’s perfect for sending system-to-user notifications.

    So basically, for “real” messages, go bot route; for simple notifications, activity feed works great.

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